A dive through a dripping copse, a final flounder along a little muddy lane, brought us into view of the house. It was certainly entitled to its name--a lonely haunted tenement, flung away into the fields to rot and perish of its own reputation. The fabric of it dated from the Tudors, but it had been patched and shored with a number of unseemly anachronisms, until it looked like a crippled house on crutches. Old barns, old byres, an old dove-cot, toppled hard by to their fall. The only modern feature about it was the filth, which discharged in one place its moister particles into a little green duck pond with no ducks in it. The house itself was half buried in trees, through which one caught a glimpse of a considerable garden to the rear, full of vegetables, but neglected. Tradition pointed to the farm as a refuge, during the Marian persecutions, of a number of non-juring ministers, who had nevertheless come to be routed out and despatched to the flames for their obduracy. It was certainly quarried with vaults, and priests’ holes, and other such sanctuaries of the desperate. “H’m!” muttered Mr Shapter, with his hand on the bell. “A very warren this, I shouldn’t be surprised. What do you think, Jannaway?” “I think as you think, sir,” answered the detective serenely. Shapter turned away impatiently. The clang of the bell answering from those bowels of silence made us all start. And, almost with the cessation of its deep voice, she stood in the opening of the door before us. The same mean sapless figure; the same unmoving face, worn and unwholesome, and scored with its grey lines of suffering or endurance. Only the eyes in it lived--the eyes of the “_petite_ demoiselle, so white and pink.” I could not picture it--I could not. Age has no past for youth--no memory of joys like its own. I shrank before the fire of those eyes; but their vision had no direction--not even for me. They looked beyond us all. Valombroso swept off his hat, and returned it to his head, being careful of the tilt. “Good-morning, madama,” he said. “Is your husband at home? We desire the honour of a word with him.” “You have come to arrest him?” The voice was as lifeless as the face. “Madama is too precipitate,” answered the detective. “A word is not necessarily a warrant.” “I have always been waiting for it to come,” she went on, in the same cold low tone, and with the same hot vision always challenging something beyond us that we could not see. “I have always expected and lived for this moment. Now, is it not in the eternal curse of things that it has come too late? Too precipitate. O, yes! too precipitate.” She gave a frozen little laugh--horrible, because the muscles of her mouth, the breath of her bosom did not seem to stir to it. “He killed my husband, my dear first love, did he not?” she asked. Not one of us could find words to answer her.